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Fluke 8060a Repair/Refurbish

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fluke_8060aI recently purchased a “Parts/Repair” Fluke 8060a off eBay for $25, and have been working on and off to repair it for the last couple weeks. When it arrived, it was quite dirty (as to be expected for a 20+ year old multimeter), and was a bit spotty in performance. It would power on, but it took some time to come up, and the readings were all over the place.

So, having read a fair bit about repairing them on the wonderful site by Mr. Modem Head, I started first by disassembling the meter to clean up the case in some Mr. Clean all purpose cleaner. Interestingly, after getting the case off, I found that the COM jack had broken loose of the PCB and just spun freely. First time for everything (I’d get that soldered up later).

Cleaning the case was quite easy, and just took some time to dry as there’s a metal shield on the interior of the back panel that cannot be removed, and therefore requires some time for the water to dry between it and the case, and after a few days, I had a nice clean case. Soldering the jack back in place just entailed firing up the soldering iron, and placing the whole tip into the jack and letting it get it nice and hot, and running solder around the jack and the PCB (similar to soldering copper pipe with a torch). I also cleaned up the LCD crystal with some plastic polish (PlastiX), and a polishing end on my drill press (set to the lowest speed, about 600rpm). This took a good 20-30 minutes of polishing to get the scratches to blend with the rest of the crystal.

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Note: IC Pins are COUNTER Clockwise

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Counter-Clockwise

Counter-Clockwise

This is mainly just a note to myself, since I can’t seem to get it through my skull, but IC pints are numbered counter clockwise. Not clockwise. I just wired up an IC backward, which I had previously done before when trying to repair a multimeter. This time, it was on an op-amp I’m using in a frequency standard (which I’ll post on later.

So, see the picture? Got it? I’m such a dumbass sometimes.

Image Courtesy of Wikipedia article on DIP. Bonus to anyone that can tell me who thought of, and why, the pins are counter-clockwise vs clockwise.

Digital Explorations

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Arduino Pro MiniFor a few years now, I’ve really wanted to monitor my water usage at the house, and like most American homes (or at least, every one I’ve seen), my analog water meter sits in the ground out by the street, making measurement a bit difficult. But, what little information is out there indicates that it should be doable with a Hall Effect Sensor (something that can “see” the spinning magnet within the meter, and output pulses). Then it’s just a matter of recording those pulses, and sending them back to my computer… enter the wild world of Arduino programming, and the wonder that is eBay and the inexpensive Chinese Arduino clones. But truthfully, what pushed me over to the idea of doing some Arduino projects (other than the really inexpensive Chinese options), was building a simple LED cube to stick in my office at work. 100x LED’s are only $4.75 or so from China, an Arduino Pro Mini knockoff is less than $3 (or just an DIP ATMega328p is about the same)… really just depends on how you want to set it all up. Anyway, I’ll try to have a new post about that a bit later. As well as one on how my water meter project is coming… the biggest issue with that is power. I either have to run some cat5 out to the meter to provide power, and return signal (I guess phone wire would work as well), or I need to have the unit run off batteries, and send the data back wirelessly (Xbee?). And obviously, if battery powered, I’m not going to want to go out and replace the batteries every week, so ideally 6months+ of runtime would be ideal… which may not be possible since the Hall Effect Sensor indicates it wants to draw about 4mA. =/

Anyway, these are the things I’m trying to work on in my “free time” (see previous posts about small child in the house). So yes, I’m showing up to this party a bit late, but maybe I had to do some analog work before I “graduated” to digital. I just wish I had learned C at some point in my learning programming before now.

But, a few things I’m working on project wise are:

  • GPS Disciplined Oscillator
  • LED Cube
  • Water Meter gauge
  • Parking Sensor (to let me know when I’m far enough into the garage)
  • Garage Door Sensor (so I can stop turning around down the street to see if the door is shut, and just check my phone)
  • Simple Programmable DC Power Supply, and matching Programmable DC Load

So, all of that should keep me busy for a while… =)